OK fine, I AM risk averse. But I’m going out on a limb here and taking, probably, the biggest chance I’ve ever taken with my blog. At this point, as I write this, I’m honestly not even sure if I should post this, because this could kill me in so many ways. But it’s (to me), an interesting topic, and I have strong feelings about it, so I feel I must do my journalistic duty.
I was inspired to write this by a fellow classmate’s question, as I sit here in an Economics Review Session. To keep this as anonymous as possible, I won’t even repeat the question. Basically, it just reiterated most of what I’ve thought over the past couple months about my experience so far at Anderson:
disappointment.
Before I rant, let me be clear about a couple things. I’m not throwing anyone “under the bus” here. Frankly, there’s a lot of blame to be spread around. Also, I do not (yet) regret my decision to attend business school generally or Anderson specifically. I needed to leave New York, and I needed to find a buy-side job in L.A. I also needed a break from work and an opportunity to expand both my professional and social networks. Anderson was clearly the best of my options.
My disappointment started as early as Orientation. And I’m not just talking about the fact that we had to be on campus every day at 8 a.m. In various presentations from Anderson administration and second-year students, I discovered that Anderson students had a general reputation as being light on quantitative skills. Nice talk for “bad at math”. Then I found out that some of our second-years don’t know how to write cover letters, to the point that recruiters who are Anderson alums have contacted the Parker Career Center to express their concerns about the reputational harm being done to Anderson. Fantastic. One of the biggest reasons I came to Anderson was to crack my way into the Investment Management industry. Seems like having “Anderson” on my resume isn’t the best start.
During the second week of Orientation, I found out I was awarded a company-sponsored fellowship. Woohoo!!! More money!!! Unfortunately, Anderson’s policy on these fellowships is to simply take the money out of any other merit-based aid you have received. So the $7,125 Payden & Rygel Fellowship that I won was simply deducted from my Anderson Fellowship. On top of this, no one actually told me about this policy until I went into the financial aid office to clear the whole mess up. Not so Woohoo :( What better way to alienate our loyal, generous donors than to say, “Thanks for the kind donation. On a net basis, this is going to mean absolutely nothing to the winner of the Fellowship, but this means we have an extra $7,125 to spend on unqualified, tenured professors.”
There’s my second disappointment. The Professors. If any of my classmates happen to stumble on this (which I will
pray tonight doesn’t happen), they’ll know who I’m referring to. Of the 5 professors I’ve had this quarter, I’d say 3 were good professors who taught us the material and, as corny as it sounds, made learning kinda fun. I think my classmates agree about 2 of them. The fourth was clearly incompetent, to the point that many of my classmates would sit in on the other professor’s lecture. The fifth basically taught us how to manipulate a certain software product to do our work for us rather than teaching us the basic concepts and theory of the subject.
I save my biggest (and most controversial) disappointment for last. My fellow classmates. I’m trying very hard to keep in mind that most of them, unlike me, haven’t had the benefit of seeing most of this “core” material before. This lack of relevant background notwithstanding, I’m still disappointed with the
book intelligence of most of my classmates. Until proven guilty, I’m going to assume that most of them were pretty good at their jobs, and that’s why they’re here. And I know book smarts are not at the top of the list of characteristics of successful businesspeople. However, I expected a minimum level of these book smarts from my classmates, and so far I haven’t seen it.
Last, but definitely not least (yeah, I know I said the previous disappointment was the last – deal with it), is what happened yesterday. Sometime in the afternoon, we FINALLY got our Marketing grades (posted online). While I pretty much expected to get the grade that I received, several classmates that I spoke with were quite surprised about their grades, given how well they had been doing up through the Final. About six hours, many data points, and some frantic emails from students to the professor later, the truth was discovered. The professor had never submitted final grades to be posted online. The system somehow decided to distribute grades based on last names. So if your last name started with an A, you would have been pretty happy because you got an A. If you’re Notre Dame safety/Professional boxer Tom Zbikowski, you failed. Better luck elsewhere. So surely there were several freaked out Y’s and Z’s who were surprised that they failed (not to mention the few pleasantly-surprised A’s and B’s who got A’s in the course). The process is currently being fixed, as the professor just arrived back from an international trip a couple hours ago. How in the world does something like this happen? My disappointment lingers.
UPDATE: I just got home from a Review Session. Not only were there about 25 more students than there were chairs, but the prof/TA leading the review session was high as a kite. Go Anderson!
UPDATE II: You may have read about someone hacking into a UCLA database and stealing personal info (including SSN's) on approx. 800,000 current and former students. Yup, you guessed it. They got mine. F*ck.
Labels: B School
